Thoughts

London: Natural History Museum part 2

Let’s continue! (Again, these pics are all thumbnails so you can click on them to see a larger version.)

The mammal exhibit hall.

Just a look at how they display the animal specimens. Some of these are life-size models, most are stuffed.

They had a note about “faded specimens” that read:The Museum is concerned about the conservation of animals in the natural world and no longer collects skins for taxidermy displays. The specimens in these displays are from the Museum’s historical collections – consequently some are faded or show other signs of their age.

This here is a yapok. (A.k.a. water opossum.) I just thought the name was interesting.
img src=”http://ind.elvenstar.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/NHM022_yapok.jpg” alt=”” width=”700″ height=”525″ class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-5312″ />

This, my friends, is a pink fairy armadillo. Really. Pink fairy! hahahaha Talk about a cute name. It’s a cute size too. But looks rather like a small mole with armour on.

Lemming! It looks like a soft toy. Such poufy cheeks!

They had a hall where they had life-size models of mammals – the blue whale model dominated the room. And above it were model skeletons of other whales. The size is really stunning. This is when seeing the animals on TV just doesn’t do justice to their size.

Wild boar! (And a pygmy hog next to it.) Looking at the wild boar, I kept thinking of Asterix and Obelix.

Moetherium model, one of the earliest ancestors of the elephant.

And did you know that elephant teeth looked like this? I didn’t.
(Left is a mammoth tooth, right is a modern Asiatic elephant tooth.)

Seashells! Apparently most shells spiral clockwise and it’s rare to find those that spin anti-clockwise. Must note this next time I find shells…

I thought these shells were amazingly patterned and coloured. Just look at that red-purple colour!

A piece of a giant sequioa tree. Huuuuuuuuuge.

View of the main hall area from the landing above the entrance, where the sequioa is.

Stained glass windows~

And then there was the Cocoon, located in the new Darwin Centre. The website says the Darwin Centre is “a state-of-the-art science and collections facility” and the Cocoon is (to my understanding) a sort of educational experience. There are interactive displays about plants and insects and if you’re lucky, you get to see the scientists at work. I wasn’t so lucky and all I saw was a few of them sitting at computers. Anyway, this is the first part of the Cocoon:

One of the interactive displays.

And they have this really cool system where when you enter the Cocoon, you get a card with a unique barcode and number on it. Throughout the Cocoon, whereever there are interactive displays and you see a scanner like the one below, you can scan your card and it’ll save the info you choose. So when you go home, you can go online, login to the website with the number on your card and you can view the saved info. Cool, right?? I tried it – so fun!

A glance into the interesting-looking science labs.

There was this interesting part where you could pretend to join a science expedition and you’d select the things you need for the expedition according to the instructions giving. It’s clearly more for little kids, but it looked fun to try. I didn’t get to though, ’cause there were quite a lot of people wanting to try it.

Part of the room where they keep specimen collections. The video projected onto the table shows you what the scientists do there when looking at the specimens.

After the Cocoon, I discovered more fossils! Whole walls covered with marine dino fossils~ Below is a pliosaur.

One section of the wall was empty and they explained why:
I liked that they included a photo of what should be there.

Shots of the fossil-covered walls:

I only didn’t like that some were so high up I couldn’t see them properly. :/ But that’s a minor complaint I guess.

Here, have a couple more fossils:

There was one fossil that was labelled as a female icthyosaur that died giving birth. They even marked out the embryo! I just wondered how on earth they figured out that it’s an embryo because it just looks like an indistinguishable blob to me. 8D

Megatherium skeleton (giant ground sloth).

One of the last exhibits I went to see was the Birds.

Look, a kakapo!
I remember making a little book on endangered animals in Std. 6 for some English project or other. I wrote about kakapos, pandas and dolphins~

I also looked at the primates exhibit but didn’t take any photos. The very last one I went to was the Earth/geology section but didn’t see the whole of it because rocks and such don’t interest me that much. hehe